Are People as Horrible as Their Comments, Part II

I’m not sure what the answers are to the questions I asked the other day, but here’s what I THINK. What I think is somewhere between a wild guess and a strong conviction, more like an informed suspicion.

Is the way people act in person just an act, while the true self is expressed on these idiot-comments forums?

To an extent, I think the answer to this is yes, even if people think they’re “just kidding.” As my friend and former colleague Joel Selvin says, “No one is ever ‘just kidding.'” On the other hand, there is an argument to be made that the true self is the compromise we make with our environment.

Is this the true voice? The true thing inside the mind? The true response to the world?

I think the answer to this is yes, as well. We’re hearing the noise inside people’s minds.

The only qualification is this: Some people are SO determined to make comments that they don’t really read what they’re commenting on. So the existence of comments could be tempting them into making snap judgments. If you offer people any detour from the effort of thought, most will take that detour most of the time, and all will take it some of the time.

The true extent of understanding? The true capacity to misapprehend the simplest reading material and manufacture a hostile response based on that misperception?

I think the answer to the first question is No. That’s a choice that people make, to pattern their thought along a narrow line and funnel given circumstances into that narrow formula. The second question is rhetorical. That answer is yes.

Is this how unhappy people truly are, how unhealthy they are, how miserable and uninteresting and insular they are? Or has the Internet developed its own rules of discourse and people are merely assuming an attitude not their own?

I think definitely yes to the second question, though see the “I’m just kidding” clause above.

The first question is more complicated. I think it’s true for some and can’t be true for all. I do think, however, that for a lot of people politics works mainly as the ideological means by which they explain their misery as evidence of moral superiority.

Or are creeps disproportionately represented among the people moved to leave comments?